Peer Into Worlds: A Guest Post by J. Courtney Sullivan
Bestselling author J. Courtney Sullivan’s (Friends and Strangers, Maine) latest novel is a haunting, atmospheric tale that spans multiple generations of women passing through a plot of land on the Maine coast. Read on to hear all about the real house that inspired her story in Sullivan’s exclusive guest post.
Hardcover $29.00
The Cliffs (Reese's Book Club)
The Cliffs (Reese's Book Club)
In Stock Online
Hardcover $29.00
A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.
A novel of family, secrets, ghosts, and homecoming set on the seaside cliffs of Maine, by the New York Times best-selling author of Friends and Strangers.
Every summer of my life, I have spent time in the beautiful seaside town of Ogunquit, Maine. Ten years ago, while there on vacation, my husband and I, along with two of our friends, discovered an abandoned house on a cliff overlooking the ocean. A pale purple Victorian, fully furnished, with framed paintings on the walls and a dollhouse in the corner of the living room, and an upstairs banister that had collapsed into the front hall.
I don’t know how it’s possible that I hadn’t seen the house before then, but every year thereafter, we returned to visit. Until one summer, the house was gone, the foundation for a McMansion dug in its place. I was irrationally bereft. Somewhere along the line, I had started to think of it as ours.
I found myself writing about the house, wondering who had lived there, why they left, and where they had gone. The objects inside—the broken banister, the paintings—told a story I would likely never know, so I invented one. Ogunquit became the fictional town of Awadapquit, which is like Ogunquit in most ways. The purple Victorian and the land on which it sits became home to a cast of fictional women, whose lives span 400 years.
At the center of it all is Jane, the present-day protagonist, who works as an archivist, uncovering the stories of women lost to time. Like me, Jane stumbles upon the house and finds herself drawn to it. In her teenage years, it serves as a hideaway from her troubled home life. Two decades later, her career and her marriage in crisis, Jane returns to Awadapquit and finds that the house’s new owner, Genevieve, has gutted the place. Their meeting leads them to learn about all the women who lived there before, including Kanti, the Indigenous Abenaki woman who was present when colonists first set foot on those shores; Eliza, a former Shaker turned housemaid to a sea captain’s wife at the time of the Civil War; and Marilyn, a painter and a mother in the 1950s. I think of the characters, each a product of her time, as being in conversation with one another.
Writing this book was a delight. I got to peer into worlds I previously knew very little about. My vision of Maine and New England expanded. I was lucky enough to visit the Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, the Penobscot reservation, the Abbe Museum, and Camp Etna, a nearly two-hundred-year-old Spiritualist summer camp, where visitors commune with lost loved ones via psychic mediums.
The purple house no longer stands and yet it is more real to me than ever. Alive in the pages of a book.